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Quick reminder: 5 billion of your taxes go to NGO groups who lobby the government. This money is effectively the common agricultural policy for Dublin 4. It keeps a whole class of people in jobs. Here's how it works:
1) You fund the HSE. The HSE gives a grant to alcohol action ireland, which is set up to lobby the HSE for healthier drinking laws. This is excellent for many reasons, not least because it means the drinks industry needs representation of its own.
2) Alcohol Action Ireland will require effective communicators to lobby the Government. Who better but some former government or political advisors, or perhaps a former political correspondent, to provide access to the media and to politicians and civil servants.
3) Naturally the beverage industry will require its side of the story to be told, so you are getting two jobs for the price of one. Quite the investment. At least one D4 PR firm will be hired, maybe two.
4) You now have maybe 20 people from the political/media class in good, well paying jobs, who exist to talk to your politicians and civil servants, and brief the journalists.
5) The journalists and advisors being briefed are generally not as well paid, and somewhat envious of these glamourous people working in Ireland's version of the west wing. It pays in the long run to be helpful if one wants a job like that oneself.
6) The more of these organisations you have, the more wonderful endorsements you can get. "Our campaign", you can say, of your campaign to get more money from the taxpayer, "is endorsed by over FORTY human rights organisations". Of course it is.
7) So the system grows, because it works. But it also helps politically. You have a particurlarly vocal bunch of critics in academia or politics? Say - what those guys need is a dedicated representative organisation funded by grants from government. Which they won't want to lose.
8) You have a whole career path for the young and the politically ambitious. What's more, you have great jobs for people who didn't quite make it in politics. And a whole industry to reward friendly journalists, and your former advisor's PR firm. It's brilliant!
9) What's more - you get a never-ending stream of *content* for the media and politics. Because these orgs must justify their existence, one of them must always be complaining about something. One of them must always be praising something. They come to dominate the agenda.
10) The problem is, the beast never stops growing. Because how can you fund *that* cause without also funding *this* one. And then you get to the point where we spend five thousand million euros a year on it. And there's no room for the regular citizen's concerns in politics.
Anyway, I think it's a cancer at the heart of the country. It should be done away with. State funded lobbying of the state excludes the citizen by design and creates a powerful class of super-citizens. Which the media have taken to calling "civil society". And it's bollox.
